This post was written as a draft, to eject some thoughts. It is prone to have plenty of language errors, unclear sentences or very ‘dutch’ type of english sentences.

Recently the public broadcaster in Belgium launched a new show, #teamscheire. For those that haven’t been able to make the time to watch an episode, it is about a group of ‘makers’ who solve specific problems or issues for everyday people.
Watching the show has made me think, a lot, about maker culture and its relation to engineering and design. About our society driven by the glorification of the capitalistic belief. About personalisation and the influence of data driven systems. About emotions. About skills in local communities.

In this brief post I want to touch on a couple of these topics, which is mostly part of my ever ongoing journey and interest in being involved in maker culture in general.
Before diving it, let’s be clear about one thing, I love this show. This is not written as a critique on the TV show itself, but more about some elements this show triggered in my brain. Some of the discussions I had with people about the show triggered quite a lot, I will do my very best to write this as constructive as possible. Don’t complain, suggest what’s better. Or as the romans would have said Noli Queri, Suade Melius.

Issue one: market value

When I watch #teamscheire, I do so primarily becuase I love to create things. Sometimes these things have no use at all, but the act of creating is something that I like to do. I keep coming back to an old Yoko Ono quote, all the time:
“I admire most creative people and most creative efforts because I like the idea that they’re doing something. Even if it’s crap, I like the idea that they’re doing something.”
Over the past weeks, I had several chats with people who talk about the work and projects part of #teamscheire as ‘hobbyist creations’ (‘knutselaars’ in Dutch). What vigourously agites me when people use that wording is the implicit assumption that ‘maker’ projects are inferior to ‘industrially produced’ projects. A typical element that pops up in dicussions which focus around this is the hunt for the greater goal. ‘WHY’ would you even spend time on making this, ‘WHAT’ do you get out of it and ‘HOW’ big is the market for this? Typically my point of view in this kind of discussions is that I don’t care about how much revenue such a project might bring – I think it is important to show a larger slice of society that we _are_ able to solve problems ourselves without the need for venture capital, stock markets or dollar signs. Just enthousiastic people willing to help out for the greater good.

Issue two: it has been done

Another quite common type of discussion is the ‘but it has been done’ type of discussion. Probably all projects shown on the #teamscheire show have been done, explored or tried out by others somewhere. A friend of mine, Lieven De Couvreur, has been running design classes since 2009 about creating and documenting personalised ‘solutions’ to very specific problems. This is the perfect example to show how important deep personalisation is, and that perhaps something can look like it has been done – whereas we might miss a small change which makes it a totally different product for a particular person.
So when someone says it has been done, I think that should be regarded as a compliment and it should trigger collaboration, not triggering to notoriously build walled gardens to “protect” intellectual property. That being said, I find it a pity #teamscheire seems exclusively linked to the University of Antwerp and imec when it comes to the involvement of educational and academic institutions.

Issue three: communities

Core to a lot of thoughts this tv show has evoked is showing what local communities can mean for each other. We ‘the people’ can solve so many of our own problems, which we somehow expect organisations or companies to solve through commercial services or products. And if you look around, you often don’t have to look too far. A farmer living nearby who turns out to be a master in welding or a neighbour across the street who is a hero in repairing clothes, a friend who can write software. For sure, the solutions made or ‘crafted’ by our local networks will never work instantly ‘out of the box’. As the #teamscheire show shows very well, iteration and testing are critical to making things. Additionally, this assumes there is a local community or network, which is in many cases does not extend beyond our front doors.

What I actually want to say:

• I want to see more projects led by enthousiasm instead of money
• I don’t think every solution should be generalised in order for it to be marketed or marketable
• I do think creating solutions that can be personalised or adjusted are interesting
• I believe we should all keep attempting to create resilient local communities, although I have no clue how to actually do that
• It feels good to watch #teamscheire and be part of, what sometimes feels like, a hippie anno 2018 movement

Disclaimer: I never thought I would write the post you’re about to read. I still don’t feel confident to engage in this debate or discussion. Nevertheless it has been on my mind for way too long, so I might as well give it a go …

This is a reply/follow up post to a somewhat aged twitter conversation earlier this year. I guess I’m now finally taking or finding the time to write down some reflections of mine around the topic of ‘design research’ and the relevancy of ‘focus groups’.

“Focus Groups Are Worthless” by @mulegirl – you will only get things people dare to say a loud in a group of strangers https://t.co/xr1DKCKavP

— Bo Smet (@bosmet) February 15, 2018

This all started with two (linked) medium posts by Mule Design studio:

• “Focus groups are worthless.” – https://medium.com/mule-design/focus-groups-are-worthless-7d30891e58f1
• “Let’s stop doing research” – https://medium.com/mule-design/lets-stop-doing-research-48efcd7118c9

I recall that I was very triggered, and perhaps a little offended, by the way @bosmet shared the article initially. It was nice to see @davidgeerts join the conversation, adding some comments from his perspective too. Do note, I ever experienced these comments as a problem in any way, Bo and David are just very good at asking critical questions that have seriously forced me to adjust my own thinking before.

The spark – summarised

First of all, the posts that sparked these conversations are not new at all, they date back to 2014 and 2016 respectively. The points made are, however, discussion topics that surface every so often in design projects – both between colleagues and between clients.

Core to the posts by Mule Design is stressing to conduct user or stakeholder research activities in context. By putting people together in an office meeting room and having them talk to each other about a topic won’t get you anywhere. In the periphery, some critisism is expressed towards doing research in a design setting. We should be wary of not doing research for the sake of research, but always have the larger picture in mind. The point is made that, in fact, we shouldn’t be questioning the ‘relevancy’ of doing research in a design context – as it should in fact be an integral part of it by default.

Some thoughts

Before ranting on, let’s be clear about one thing. I very much believe people in design and development should be talking and immersing themselves in the context of their users or related stakeholders as much as possible. And I would argue that any kind of contact with stakeholders, whether it is on the street or in a sterile meeting room is better compared to no contact at all.

What probably troubles me mostly about the article that sparked the converstation on twitter and this little ranty post, is that it is easy to talk crap about a ‘method’ like focus groups, to talk crap about research and to glorify the greatness of the all inclusive design profession. I get very agitated when people tell me stories about talking to users and they didn’t get anything out of it. In my opinion, if your plan was to get anything out of it in the first place – you’re doing it wrong. The reason you’re engaging with stakeholders is to find inspiration, to look at something from another point of view or maybe just to have a good chat with someone you would otherwise never talk to. From that respect, a stakeholder involvement activity always results in something (thanks @jurgentanghe for this reflection).

Another something that troubles me is the obsession with labelling ‘activities’. When naming something ‘focus group’ the social scientist in the room might have a very different idea about compared to the engineer in the room. (imagine, a social scientist and an engineer in the same room – ohnoes </sarcasm>). To me, I (relatively) do not care if what you do is a focus group, a diary study, a cultural probe, a creative session, a questionnaire, an empathy building excersise, an interview, a structured interview, a prototype test, a usability test, a user experience test, a collaborative design session, or whatever label you like to use. Obviously it makes sense to have these labels in textbooks and stick to them in education and be able to link to them when writing up – for instance – an academic paper. People in design practice, however, should imo be able to bend and stretch these labels in order to fit a project context better.

The crux in all of this is when doing ‘research’ activities, people in design practice should primarily be concerned with knowing what they want to understand better, where the unknown issues lie, and then figure out in which way that knowledge can be uncovered. I think it is part of the design profession to be able to make that translation, to be creative in combining textbook examples of stakeholder involvement methods and by doing so moving towards a more informed design process.

I realise that I might have mixed up ‘research’ with ‘stakeholder involvement’ above. Obviously stakeholder invovlement is just one type of research in a design process. Nevertheless, I think in general the same points apply to any kind of research activity which takes place as part of the design process.

“Stakeholder involvement never got me anywhere, it’s time I could have spent on actually making stuff.”

If you expect user involvement activities to direct or guide the outcomes of your design process, I can accept and follow the above statement. I also believe that exactly that point is where a lot of issues are to be discussed. Involving stakeholders is about understanding contexts of use (as Frouke Sleeswijk Visser wrote about so many years ago), approach and view a situation from a different point of view and developing a different relation with the target audience(s) being addressed.

So, and this has been said by many others before as well, conciously thinking about research in a design process is something you either go all in on or don’t do it at all. If you keep questioning the value of doing a stakeholder involvement activity, or if the focus remains on what you might or might not get out of it, it might be better to just stop debating about it. Increasingly often, when this topic emerges in conversation, I choose to stop justifying. I increasingly think it’s a total waste of energy to try to convice people to conciously do research activities in a design process. Some years ago, I reworked the ‘believe in process‘ poster – which I think still covers the message to be told quite fully.

When not (conciously) doing user invovlement activities as part of the design process, chances are very real you’ll get to the same end result as if you would have done it. Chances are evenly real that, in the end, you did involve stakeholders and you did do research activities – you just didn’t experience them as a separate activity.

It’s all been said before, Dries. This has become a boring conversation. You’re just repeating and preaching to the choir.

Yes, that’s a large part of my frustration. The conversation on whether a focus group is valid or not is probably not the conversation we should be having anymore, but it does seem to come back every so often – so I guess it can be a good cornerstone to keep alive. In the May-June edition of interactions magazine, Jon Kolko wrote an article on that other elephant in the room ‘design thinking’. One of the better statements from that article that somewhat summarises my above ramblings:

To work this way, designers need humility. In a participatory, inclusive, and democratic environment, a designer can’t be construed as the “person with the answer.” Instead, they are a guide or facilitator, one helping apply a foreign creative process.

What I like about that quote, are the first four words of it. ‘To work this way’ tells me that this is not the only way to work. I think we should not expect people in design to work in a participatory way by default, we should not expect designers to be the ones with the lego bricks and the sticky notes, we should not expect designers to be the ones critisising line width or font choice.

Linking this back to the starting point of this post, I could conclude stating:

“When prejudices about what the expected outcome of a stakeholder involvement research acitivity are ditched – only then the research inclusive design process can start to shine.”

Yesterday SpaceX launched their coveted falcon heavy rocket. I watched the show in my local hackerspace, totally nerding out with other nerds. It was fun, it was unbelievable – everyone was going crazy for science. The sight of the two side boosters landing simultaneously remains very surreal, and the idea of shooting a car to mars ‘just because’ is totally insane.

Today, the day after the launch, I’ve been reading and thinking about this a lot. Yesterday’s launch makes me euphoric AND troubled at the same time. For various reasons. I’m writing this post to explore this a little further and to question my own thinking in all of this.

Since I’ve seen a few people deleting some of their initial (euphoric) reactions on the launch – I guess there are more people out there who have started to question the whole thing.

//edit: In this post I intend to question things (mostly to myself), I do by no means aim to take a stance or make claims. I realise that I’m putting some things bluntly and cutting many corners. I do not intend to offend or point at anyone or anything.

//edit2: I initially called SpaceX a large organisation, but thanks to some comments received online and offline I realised that the point I want to make is that it is a privately owned company. So I changed that my stream of ‘questions to self’ below.

Reasons to be euphoric

Elon Musk makes us dream again.

The quote above forms the core of my reasoning there. If we let go of all critical thoughts or aversions agains flamethrowers and the like, all I could say when seeing that launch yesterday was “Holy F*ck”. It felt like I was watching a blue sky sci-fi show, we’re going to mars! Don’t panic and undust your hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy!

I’m not the first one to say our society has somewhat lost an ideal to strive for, together. Our society is so focussed on individualistion, closing front doors and curtains, switching on netflix and getting lost in the world of kudo’s and likes. Not that long ago I wrote a bit on accountability, which is something my mind keeps getting back to as well.

So I think the least we should value in the SpaceX launch is that it got people to dream. As I read somewhere else today:

What we witnessed yesterday was the internet generation’s equivalent of the moon landing, and that Roadster might well remain the totemic symbol of the achievement.

Reasons to be critical

To contrast the euphoria, the inevitable comments surfaced really quickly. Mostly along the lines of whether we shouldn’t care about our own planet first, focus on solving issues we have regarding climate change, famine, healthcare, human rights. At first I neglected those comments, but the more I came accross these types of reactions – it did get me thinking.

A very triggering something was that I found myself reading about ‘the future is now‘ – an exploration by The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to explore what the future of humanitarian aid can or should look like. Reading through the most excellent work, I realised that the whole ‘space race 2.0’ might get people to dream – but does it get them to dream in perspective to ‘humanity’ and the societal context we live in? I came to understand this is history allover again, we can send cars to mars – but we fail to chat to our nextdoor neighbour. We’re incapable of creating humane political structures, or acting responsibly related to environmental issues. I came to understand that, perhaps, SpaceX is operating in an old fashioned view on science and innovation where privately owned institues are required to thrive change. Perhaps ‘real’ change is to be found in a more grassroots oriented take on society, where we first focus on getting the basics of our socio-economic context right before we think about fleeing to another planet.

Dreaming

So while the idea of ‘making people dream again’ is something I value a lot, I have been wondering for the past hours how “the mainstream” can be involved in dreaming about issues that don’t get pushed to us.

In a world where everyone’s status is “maybe” or “interested” but fails to take actual commitment to do something without a direct monetary reward (cutting many corners here #sorrynotsorry) – I think I’ll keep on exploring the idea of getting people to dream in a better framed societal context. Whatever that might mean.

“At least we’re not complaining, there’s already plenty of salt in the sea.” — A.T.